


damn, I wish I was your lover

by firstaudrina



Category: Gossip Girl
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-10
Updated: 2014-09-10
Packaged: 2018-02-16 20:09:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2282949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Serena isn't sure that she's ever had a normal friend, someone she could spend contented hours with without a fight seeming to lurk around the corner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	damn, I wish I was your lover

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bladeCleaner](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bladeCleaner/gifts).



> In my head this diverges from canon somewhere in s1. Basically Dan and Serena never broke up, and also Rufus and Lily got together earlier.

Dan's acceptance to Brown is a shock, a surprise, a gift of sorts: he presents it to Serena with an abashed half-smile, his brows drawn together. 

"I just wanted to see if I could do it," he says. "I didn't want to pressure you."

Serena looks down at the crisp white paper. _Dear Mr. Humphrey_ , it seems to exclaim, _congratulations!_ She feels breathless in a way that is neither good nor bad, just is – the idea of being thousands of miles from Dan had made her seasick but to have him there by her side for another four years… It doesn't feel entirely like the fresh start she wanted, either. 

She knows Dan was accepted to Yale and Columbia and NYU too. He has his share of options and the one he takes is pretty much up to her. His future is right there in her hands. 

"So what do you say?"

Serena meets his eyes and lets herself smile – beam, really. "They probably won't let us room together, huh?"

 

 

They don't get to room together, of course, but Dan ends up two floors above her in the same building. They move in the same day in a whirlwind of family and boxes, both of them running between floors constantly because they ended up with each other's stuff, or they need the other parent. Serena meets her roommate in the middle of the maelstrom, a girl named Toni who just has her dad there, both of them blinking a little at Serena's explosion of relatives and couture. 

Dan meets Toni briefly too when he comes down to inform Serena that Lily and Rufus are insistent about taking them to a last familial dinner. 

"Your brother's going here too?" Toni asks, glancing after him. "That's cool. It's gotta be nice to have someone around – I miss my sister already."

Serena wrinkles her nose before she can help it, laughing a little. "Oh, no, he's my boyfriend. But our parents are married." At the look on Toni's face, she hastily adds, "It's a long story, only half as creepy as it sounds."

Toni smiles then – and she has a very nice smile, wide and sly. "You can tell me the whole thing tonight," she says. "Roomie bonding experience." 

Serena feels a flood of unexpected relief. She's been getting texts all day about Blair's apparently horrendous roommate situation up at Yale, and she'd been a little afraid of having someone who would end up a nightmare. But least Toni seems friendly. "Can't wait."

 

 

Serena's good feeling pays off, and she and Toni are practically attached at the hip by the end of the first month. Toni is fun and easy to be around, always up for going out no matter where they go. She studies economics, which Serena finds mindboggling, and best yet, she's never heard of Gossip Girl. 

"You're lucky," Dan tells her. "If I don't kill this dudebro I'm rooming with by Christmas, I'll be shocked." 

And the thing is, Serena _does_ feel lucky. She's always made friends easily but lost them just as quick; the Constance girls kept it surface, wary of seeming to declare an allegiance one way or another. Nate and Blair were constants, but they were complicated too. She's not sure she's ever had a normal friend, someone she could spend contented hours with without a fight seeming to lurk around the corner.

Blair pouts at her over the phone. "You talk about this girl all the time. You've replaced me and it's only been two minutes!" she complains. "Tell me she isn't prettier than I am."

"No one's prettier than you are, B," Serena laughs, and it is true, of course, but she can't help thinking Toni is pretty in a _different_ way. Sometimes when Serena looks at her, like when they're sitting in the park on the grass and the sunlight hits the side of her face – well. Serena thinks Toni might be exceptionally pretty. 

She has a nice, open face with a strong jaw and phenomenally well-groomed eyebrows; she wears her hair shoulder-length, an explosion of tight curls almost the same warm golden-brown as her skin; her eyes are hazel, almost green. But those are just a list of attributes, pretty descriptions. Whatever Toni's got, Serena isn't sure there's a word for it. 

 

 

Serena sees Dan a lot less than she would have thought. He's always busy with coursework or all these clubs – Dan Humphrey, a joiner, who would have thought – and Serena is barely balancing school and new friends herself. When Dan's roommate is out scoring chicks, or something similarly fratty, Serena goes up and they fool around but it's not the kind of college life she envisioned for them. She thought they'd be closer this far away from everyone and everything that used to get in their way, but if anything it feels like they're drifting apart. 

"How long've you been dating?" Toni asks. She's doing Serena's nails for her, a pale pink shot through with gold glitter. She holds Serena's hand delicately in her own.

"Two years," Serena murmurs, not sure why it comes out so melancholy. To make up for the tone, she adds, "I love him so much, you know. He's really the first guy I ever…" And she loses her voice a little then, unable to articulate what Dan did for her without it coming off cheesy or trite. Toni gives her a sympathetic look.

"My girlfriend and I broke up before I came here," she offers. "She was my first girlfriend ever, like, full stop, thought we were going to die together with a million cats. But she thought it'd be too far, me here and her back in Cali." Her lips draw up in a little bit of a pout, but her expression clears when she meets Serena's eyes. "I don't know. You think when you love someone, none of that stuff should matter, but it does. Dumb, huh?"

"Not dumb," Serena says softly, and gives Toni's hand a squeeze. "Not at all."

So with the distance growing between them, it's both a surprise and not when Serena finds Dan making out with someone else. 

They're at a party off campus on a Friday. Serena came with Toni. She had no idea Dan was even there until she went upstairs to try and find a bathroom and instead found Dan in someone's bedroom, on someone's bed, with his tongue down someone's throat. 

Her face crumples automatically but there's a dull feeling of resignation in the pit of her stomach that she doesn't want to investigate. Dan tries to apologize, tries to explain, but Serena gets the hell out of there as fast as she can, making sure to snag a bottle of vodka on her way out.

Toni finds her back at the dorm hours later, hiccupping a little and very, very drunk.

"You disappeared," she says reproachfully. "I was really worried. I didn't know if something had happened to you!"

"Something did," Serena mutters.

 

 

She spends two weeks avoiding Dan and spends that time in some kind of endless monologue about their relationship to Toni, a spilling of information that Serena has never really engaged in before, not even to Blair. She can't help it. Serena is all raw nerves, all heartbreak, all guilt. 

Because the thing is, she does feel a tiny little twinge of release. 

"Do you think he's gay?" she muses, glaring darkly at the back of Dan's head in the one class they all have together, an intro history course. 

That was the other thing: the person Dan was kissing was a boy.

"Who knows?" Toni says with a shrug, ignoring Serena's moping as she takes notes. She has a clear, readable handwriting and she's a prolific note-taker, lucky for Serena; sometimes she even color-codes, which reminds Serena pleasantly of Blair. "Wouldn't be the first time a freshman got drunk at a party and same sexed it up."

"He never said. If he thought about it."

Toni slides her an amused glance. "You tell him everything that goes on in _your_ head?"

It's that more than anything that drives Serena to seek Dan out for explanations, arms crossed and expression set in unforgiving lines. They get coffee on campus and she waves away his effusive apologies, simply has no interest in them.

"Just tell me why," she says finally, after silence has fallen between them. "Why couldn't you tell me?"

"It just happened," Dan insists. "I was drunk and, you know. One thing to another."

It's a shitty explanation as explanations go, but Serena couldn't deny that it's one she's given herself many a time. "Dan, you know if you want to see other people, first you have to break up with the person you're with, right?"

His expression turns stupidly soft in a way that batters her defenses a little. "I don't want to break up. I don't want you out of my life." 

"I'm not," she says, because she's not sure how she could be, at this point. But, more gently, "We are definitely breaking up, though."

Dan takes her hand and she lets him, thinking – two years taken down in two months. She always thought the ecosystem of the Upper East Side was keeping them down but now she thinks it was the opposite: the us-against-the-world thing was keeping them together, and as soon as they made it into the real world, it all fell apart. Left to their own devices, standing on their own two feet, their relationship didn't stand a chance. 

"Was he at least cute?" Serena asks begrudgingly. "I didn't get a good look because of, you know, the freaking out."

Dan gives her a hesitant look, then says, "In dim lighting he was alright. Daytime, not so much."

Her lips twist in an unwilling laugh. "Better luck next time."

 

 

The truly bizarre thing is that as soon as they break up, officially, Serena finds herself in the middle of the kind of life she thought she'd have with Dan at school. Half the time he brings her and Toni coffee in the morning, and then comes by at night to study or watch a movie curled up on her bed. She drags him out to parties on the weekend and drags him out to breakfast hungover the next morning. It's exactly what she pictured minus the kissing. And the helping to hook him up with guys, because playing matchmaker for her ex was not exactly something Serena expected herself to do.

"Ooh, what about him?" 

The three of them are sprawled across her and Toni's room late one Wednesday, Dan sexiled by his douchey roommate. Serena has forced him to get grindr on his phone, mostly to amuse her. 

"Romance is dead," Dan says with a sigh, highlighting something in his book. He does look up though, curiosity getting the better of him, and decides, "His eyes are too far apart, he looks like a frog."

"You guys have the weirdest relationship," Toni says, shaking her head. "People could do _studies_."

"Hey, we're just your run of the mill step-siblings who have slept together and now encourage each other's sexual fluidity," Dan says. "That's super normal."

"Uh-huh, the most normal," Serena says, pointing to another guy, who Dan gives a considering look to.

Toni remains unconvinced. " _Studies_ ," she repeats. "For _science_."

 

 

Serena has sex with a girl. It's kind of an accident.

Not an accident in the strictest sense. Serena knows what she's doing, she's fully informed and not even tipsy, but she didn't _mean_ to do it, initially, so that makes it an accident. Kind of.

It isn't the first time. She used to mess around with friends when she was fucked up, but that was all she thought it was: messing around. Being fucked up. It wasn't anything she did when she was sober so it didn't count, _obviously_. 

This is definitely different, though. A pretty girl with box braids sweet-talks Serena in line for coffee, and somehow an hour later they're making out and then, you know, other stuff. 

The first thing Serena does afterwards is skip her afternoon class and go to Dan's. She announces, "I had sex with a girl."

He laughs at her. "You and Toni, finally," he says. "I thought it was never gonna happen."

Serena blinks at him. "It wasn't Toni." 

Dan returns the blink and what follows is a long, awkward conversation that leaves Serena with more questions than answers. How could Dan think she was interested in Toni? They were just friends, _new_ friends, and sure, Toni was gay but that didn't mean anything. Toni was fun and beautiful and smart and they got along eerily well, but that didn't _mean_ anything.

Why would it?

 

 

Serena feels weird after that. It's like she no longer knows how to act, tense and uncertain, unable to joke or laugh with Toni like she used to. She's just this weirdo walking around nervous all day, which is not who she is on a variety of levels. 

The thing is, the more she thought about it, the more the idea started to take root in her somewhere, like a hook lodged low in her ribcage. She thinks about Dan's easy laugh and quick assumption, how obvious it seemed to him, and she wonders if maybe it's obvious to everyone but her. 

Blair always refers to Toni as "your new girlfriend" only half-jokingly, which Serena brushed off as Blair's ridiculous jealousy rearing its head again, nothing more. Serena's just never had a friend like Toni before – a normal friend.

But maybe her feelings aren't exactly normal friend feelings. It's hard to tell – boundaries were never Serena's strong suit, technically speaking.

"Serena…" Toni says, giving her a curious look as she gets ready one morning. "You've been a little…" She bites her lip. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," Serena says, faux-bright. "Of course."

"Okay." Toni seems unconvinced. "I didn't do anything, did I? You're not mad at me?"

It's not as hard to be genuine then. "No, of course not!"

But Toni doesn't seem to quite buy that, either.

 

 

It comes to a head at the end of the semester, right before Christmas. Toni's finals finished first so she was leaving first, and it would be a month or more before they saw each other again. A month of Serena in New York and Toni in L.A. that felt suddenly unbearable.

When it's time for Toni to head to the airport, Serena helps bring bags down to the curb. There's only a minute or two before the cab will be there and it feels strangely pressure-filled, these last minutes they'll have for a while.

Finally the cab does come and Toni turns that wide, playful smile Serena's way, says, "We'll be seeing each other again before you know it."

"I know," Serena says, almost apologetic, but she feels fidgety and unlike herself. In a rush, she adds, "I just wanted to tell you something first."

Toni raises an eyebrow. "Go ahead?"

"I just –" Serena starts, fails. "I just… Really I think I –"

And since actions have always served her better than words, she takes one breathless step forward and kisses Toni on the mouth, there on the street beside the open door of a cab. She's pretty sure no one takes a picture, and that's a wonderful thing.

Serena's not a person who thinks about consequences but she does have a split-second of worry as she pulls back. She could have just royally fucked everything up; it wouldn't be the first time. 

But Toni is smiling a little, softer and sweeter than her smile before. "Well this vacation just got a lot less appealing." 

Serena laughs a little. "That was okay? That's not… Things aren't going to be weird now?"

"We'll have to see when I get back," Toni says. "But I'm feeling pretty good right now."

"Good," Serena says, smiling, feeling maybe a little shy. 

"Good," Toni echoes, and just looks at Serena – like maybe she's trying to hold the image of Serena in her mind, like she's reluctant to go, like she thinks Serena is something wonderful.

And right then, Serena feels pretty wonderful.


End file.
